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December 01, 1999 |
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Dreamcast - Sega's Last Console? Its seems that the Dreamcast will be Sega's last console. After a Okawa Foundation meeting a chairman their for Sega stated that the Dreamcast will be Sega's last Console. The company will concentrate on E-Business and using the Dreamcast as a tool for gamers and "businesss" (i do not see how the Dreamcast could be used by business but whatever). The company also showed the long awaited Dreamcast Zip Drive, a Dreamcast Camera, and a Ethernet Card that could be put in place of the 56k modem on the Dreamcast Now. Thornado Mp3 - Dolphin Music? Factor 5 released this mp3 earlier today. Is this what Dolphin Music will sound like? God I hope so. This is some of the best music for a game I have ever heard you have to Download this. ThornadoMp3. Courtesy of IGN. Konami - likes FM Radio a lot. Konami plans to launch a game distribution service using FM Radio. The game data distribution service would use using FM multiplex broadcasting. Konami plans to incorporate FM reception capabilities for its home console games, arcade games, and toys. FM multiplex broadcasting is a way in which digital data can be transmitted using "gaps" between radio frequencies. Using this system, Tokyo FM presently operates a "visual radio" service to transmit text data such as traffic reports. The company has demonstrated the system which could download a song in about ten seconds at a rate of 16 bits/second. The technology is currently widely used for transmitting "visual radio" services by FM Tokyo for things such as text based traffic reports. The broadcast of course wouldn't require phone lines, or complicated mobile phone networks, and it would be free. Given Konami's involvement with Nintendo on Dolphin and Game Boy Advance, there's a likely chance that this technology might be used in conjunction with a Nintendo product in the future. Things like allowing the Game Boy Advance or perhaps even Dolphin to download text stories, and simple programs for free. (ds) Courtesy of Nintendojo NEC - Announces it will be manufacturing Chips for the Dolphin. TOKYO — Toshiba Corp. is quietly making plans to transfer its embedded-DRAM process to a pair of Taiwanese wafer foundries following the collapse of its agreement with Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., EE Times has learned. The news comes on the heels of an announcement that NEC Corp. will build a wafer fab for graphics chips using an alternative embedded memory for Nintendo Co.'s next-generation game console, code-named Dolphin. Taken together, the two moves suggest that conventional embedded DRAM is still slogging ahead while alternative approaches are picking up the pace. "Memory vendors all hoped embedded DRAM would be a way out of a horrible market situation, but it hasn't materialized that way," said Jim Handy, memory analyst for Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). NEC will invest about $755 million on a fab to make Nintendo's graphics chip, which uses a one-transistor SRAM cell from MoSys Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). The fab will also build a discrete high-speed DRAM for Dolphin. "The load of [embedded-memory] chips on a line is heavy," said Keiichi Shimakura, associate senior vice president of NEC. "It is impossible to make such chips on our existing lines. We need a new line." Though the fab's first target is Dolphin, the line could be used for other chips based on NEC's UX4 process in the future. Transfer to Taiwan Separately, Toshiba is preparing to transfer its embedded-DRAM process to Taiwan's Winbond Electronics Corp. and World Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., which already produce discrete memories for Toshiba, said Peter Richmond, director of business development for ASICs and application-specific standard products at Toshiba America Electronic Components (San Jose). No startup date has been set, as final details are being worked out, he said. In mid-1997, Toshiba signed Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor to a five-year deal to build embedded memories using a 0.35-micron process, later to be migrated to 0.25 micron. First parts were scheduled to roll out of Chartered's Fab 3 last year. The deal fell through, however, with Chartered's claiming the technology wasn't cost-effective. In a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Chartered said that "by the latter half of 1998, extreme weakness and volatility of the market and adverse customer perceptions on the cost of the application, together with customer views of the long and complicated product development cycle, led to difficulties in both Chartered and the licensor fulfilling the original intent of the agreement." The filing did not disclose the identity of the customer, but Toshiba's Richmond confirmed his company was the other party in the deal. The derailment was costly for Chartered, forcing a $31.8 million charge last year. The company also paid Toshiba $6.5 million in August. That wasn't the only failed embedded-DRAM partnership in recent years. LSI Logic Corp. and Micron Technology Inc. linked up to co-develop eDRAM, but eventually split after deciding the development costs were too high. LSI moved on and this month joined with Hitachi Ltd. on a wide-ranging agreement that will include using Hitachi as a foundry for standard and custom devices with embedded DRAM. Richmond said he wasn't close enough to the Chartered deal to discuss why it went sour, referring those questions to Toshiba's headquarters in Tokyo. An inquiry there had not been returned by press time. Nevertheless, Richmond contended that Toshiba has successfully built its eDRAM in its own fabs since 1995. "We're seeing design wins all across the industry. Toshiba is probably the world leader in volume" for embedded DRAM, he said. He mentioned NeoMagic Corp. and Pixelworks Inc. as announced users, but added that many other customers, who have asked not to be identified, are also mulling the technology. However, Pixelworks became the latest MoSys licensee this past week, when it chose the company's one-transistor, or 1T, technology for use in a future display controller. Since it decided to offer its proprietary technology to outside vendors in August 1998, MoSys has announced licensing deals with NEC, Analog Devices Inc. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. It has also signed nondisclosure agreements with more than 30 companies, including Chartered, said Mark-Eric Jones, vice president and general manager of intellectual property for MoSys. "We do have some customers that are interested in [MoSys]," said Ana Hunter, vice president of worldwide electronic design for Chartered. "We've had discussions with [MoSys] to prove out the technology. If our customers are interested in that IP [intellectual property], then we will evaluate it." Although MoSys calls its technology an embedded SRAM for marketing reasons, it is actually an embedded DRAM: DRAMs have one transistor and one capacitor in each storage location, while SRAMs have four- or six-transistor cells, said Steve Przybylski, principal consultant with Verdande Group. "The primary characteristics of DRAM are relatively long access times and complexity associated with row- and-column accesses and refresh," he said. "MoSys has hidden all of that complexity and dramatically decreased the access time, to make the memory array behave like SRAM, but with most of the density advantage of DRAM. They're trying to deliver the best of both worlds, and coming close." Knowing the trade-offs The MoSys approach has a clear advantage when there is a requirement for intermediate density plus high speed and bandwidth, Przybylski said. Traditional embedded DRAM is better-suited for applications requiring large densities, but where access time poses less of a problem for the designer. One reason MoSys' 1T cell is an attractive alternative to embedded DRAM or SRAM is that it is process-technology neutral, so it can be used either in a pure logic process or a merged DRAM process, said MoSys' Jones. "We're not talking about breaking any design rules. If we use a pure logic process, the overall die area is three times better than SRAM. But in the same geometry using embedded DRAM we can also implement a 1T SRAM on that process. If embedded DRAM is an option, we can give you SRAM speed out of that DRAM process. You then end up with a density that is pretty close to embedded DRAM — within 10 to 20 percent. You can get halfway to DRAM density without changing the process at all." Toshiba's Richmond acknowledged that while strong in graphics chips, embedded DRAM hasn't found a niche everywhere. "We never anticipated it being a high-volume commodity, where you merge a discrete DRAM and a discrete ASIC and see a price reduction," he said. "The technology is for increasing the performance of a memory and lowering cost." For products like disk drives, which "don't typically need that increased performance . . . the cost structures don't match." Earlier this year, some chip vendors modified their eDRAM process technologies to squeeze out costs while exploring unorthodox variations. The hope was that at the 0.18-micron generation, more designers would look toward embedded DRAM to boost performance and possibly find an answer to the design-reuse quandary. Samsung, for example, which has staked its burgeoning ASIC business on the wide use of embedded DRAM, began putting its money into the development of both a DRAM-centric process and a premium DRAM-cum-logic process technology. The strategy was two-pronged: to deploy a DRAM-based technology for cost-sensitive PC peripheral applications such as hard-disk drives that can sacrifice logic speed; and to create a premium, unified process technology that aims for high-density memory and fast logic for graphics chips, game machines and network applications that need speedy logic performance. For other applications, such as networking, Toshiba this year has worked with design house Mosaid Technologies Inc. (Ottawa) on a handcrafted networking chip containing multiple forms of memory, including DRAM, SRAM, FIFOs, flash and content-addressable memory (CAM). 50-50 combo "The ideal thing is to look for a 50-50 logic-memory combination," said Mark Roberts, director of technical marketing for the semiconductor division at Mosaid, which earlier this year announced it would design a network switch device that will be produced by Toshiba. "Our switch is 50-50, so we're able to best leverage the process. We've had our customer estimate that we're saving them $150 in synchronous SRAM because they would have had to go to multiple-width SRAMs to achieve what we can on on-chip DRAM," he said. Mosaid sometimes also employs CAM and pitch-matching SRAM, which matches the geometry of the DRAM to enable faster DRAM accesses. "In networking, pitched-matched SRAM would be used for a serial-to-parallel converter for the MACs [media-access controllers]to get massively parallel access to the DRAM. And you still have the high-speed SRAM element," said Roberts. Depending on what it's used for, the memory is handcrafted for performance, density or power reduction. "We're basically working with the memory at the atomic level," Roberts said. "The memories are application-specific, whether it's a link list of pointers for packets or FIFOs for MACs." That's a big change from the first off-the-shelf chips with embedded DRAMs that hit the market several years ago. "Four years ago, people were using DRAM basically for board-level emulation on-chip. NeoMagic had a 16-Mbit design, took half of the memory away and put logic in there and used it very much as we would a board. They had low performance but high integration," Roberts said. Moving away from a one-size-fits-all mentality for eDRAMs may be what chip vendors need to attract customers who recognize the technology's potential, but aren't yet convinced. Courtesy of PlanetN2000 |
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